Category Archives: Rich and successful

I have been a little tardy of late and, as a result, not written words of wisdom for you, my dear Institute of Mediocre Management members. My poor excuse is that that unfortunately, due to a number of unenforced management errors, my global empire has of late taken a battering. But luckily we have managed to steady the ship and the share price by re-organising, thus maintaining our salaries and bonuses. This was quite simple, we just fired a lot of people. The downside was the paper work, they wouldn’t go without a fuss, thus wasting my management’s time and more seriously mine, so I was not able to update this collection of excellent and enlightening essays . So blame them.

‘The World’s Grumpiest Boss’ dies

It was with great sadness that I read about the recent death of Mike “Do your jobs and keep your mouth shut!” Davies, who was a spiritual mentor of mine.

Mike Davis was a former chauffeur before he became a Houston oil and gas magnate. But he earned an even greater measure of notoriety as the author of blunt and widely circulated office memos that earned him the unofficial title “world’s grumpiest boss.” “There will be no more birthday celebrations, birthday cakes, levity or celebrations of any kind within the office,” the boss wrote on Feb. 8, 1978. “This is a business office. If you have to celebrate, do it after office hours on your own time.”

I had the pleasure of meeting him once and he repeated verbatim the memo he once sent famously to his employees at the Tiger Oil company in the 1970’s

“Do not speak to me when you see me, if I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to (all of) you.”

I took that to heart and Anglicised that, telling my associates oiks to “Shut up and know your place” – I’m sure that those I haven’t ‘let go’ yet still think of this with some amusement.

As a boss, Mike lead from the front screaming, hung around the middle yelling, whilst pushing from the back swearing. Had he been in management 20 years later his enlightening, challenging and witty epithets would be adorning the walls of most of our major corporations as ‘Motivational Posters’.

His memos (for those under 40 – a memo is what your grandad used instead of email) included:

ON NOTES THAT WEREN’T TYPED: “Handwriting takes much longer than a typewriter. You’re wasting your time, but more importantly, you’re wasting my time. If you don’t know how to type, you’d better learn.”

ON RUNNING OUT FOR CIGARETTES: “I suggest that you people buy enough cigarettes to keep here for yourselves to smoke because, by God, you will not go and buy them on my time.”

ON TAKING THINGS FROM HIS DESK: “I do not appreciate people coming into my office and helping themselves to my candy, cigars, medicine and other personal items … I don’t mind giving, but I would like the privilege of knowing and giving it myself.”

ON HIPPIE-STYLE LONG HAIR: “Anyone who lets their hair grow below their ears to where I can’t see their ears means they don’t wash. If they don’t wash, they stink. And if they stink, I don’t want the son-of-a-bitch around me.”

ON LANGUAGE: “I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege, and this privilege is not to be interpreted as the same for any employee. That differentiates me from you, and I want to keep it that way. There will be absolutely no swearing, by any employee, male or female, in this office, ever.”

We can all learn from his leadership skills, although nowadays you need to be a little less direct due to the namby-pamby HR centric rules that seem to be prevalent in this neo- socialist society that we live in. To cover your tracks just stick up a motivational poster or two like this.

The final word must come from Mike and of course I’m sure that I.M.M. members could use this wisdom almost verbatim when addressing colleagues resources about holiday entitlement.

And don’t forget this incredibly informative and hugely invaluable book is still available from Amazon UK and Amazon US eBook and for posh people in print as well.

The I.M.M. recently brought in a Change Management consultant to review our employment philosophy guidelines and he came up with a ‘New Thinking’ proposal. As the precocious stripey-shirted oik was charging us a significant percentage of the National Debt per day to come up with this information, initially we had to take it seriously. His report, a 521 page Powerpoint ‘deck’, remains unread, it’s mostly a cut and paste for something he did for B.P., but we did read the executive summary. Well most of it anyway.

Rufus , our MBA qualified Intern has now transposed this onto a single slide with the Institute’s comments. We apologise for the tardiness of the response but our Chairman was concerned about the font and the shade of red used and whether this was ‘on brand’ or not.

As you can see from the above, we will be continuing to used the tried and tested I.M.M. thinking which has worked very well for our members, mostly ‘C’ level execs who all successfully rode out the recession. This thinking is also supported by the vast majority of the FTSE 250 roster whose executive pay has also managed to keep pace with top end house price and luxury car inflation which is awful. “Oh to live in a two up two down in Bolton, so much less hassle” is a common refrain at the Club.

The New Thinking concept is prevalent mainly in new start up companies that tend to locate themselves in Shoreditch (in an industrial estate bordered by an abattoir and London’s largest squat). They all sit on Bean Bags full of Fairtrade Llama fur and play table football while eating Quinoa wraps. It’s a wonder they find time to drag their brains from FaceChat to do any work.

In the end, the only person to make any dosh out of this type of enterprise, will be the founder and his mate. Having borrowed 13 squillion pounds to create an App that links together people who have an unhealthy interest in Armadillos with others who are similarly inclined but also vegan, they then sell out to a multinational techie conglomerate who are desperate to acquire the next new thing and have plenty of spare cash because they don’t pay any taxes.

Therefore our conclusion, unanimously agreed over a rather pleasant lunch at our corporate hospitality box was to leave things as is. Far less work.

Brian’s report, which he has now modified, to reflect what we thought in the first place, is available to all our members. It is on the website but of course we can fax it over if you prefer and for our luddite contingent a typed transcript is also available. For really busy Thought Leaders a single 3 bullet point summary may also be requested.

If you think the term 􏰀low-hanging fruit􏰁 should describe a soft object that hits you on the head as you walk through an orchard, rather than a business opportunity that is easy to deliver, then you will love this book!

The Master of Corporate Administration (MCA) covers key topics such as finance, marketing, projects and presentations. It’s a course guaranteed to set readers on the path to financial rewards, power and share options, by answering a variety of questions that include:

Why do CEOs with a 4-year contract always have 5-year plans? Is a liability a financial metric or a description of the leadership team? How can an inanimate object like a company have corporate values?

How To Get To The Top Without Working Too Hard provides a humorous look at the business and professional world. It’s the perfect, light-hearted read for anyone who wants to get to the top… and fast!

*this should read 50% increase in MY income. Apologies for any inconvenience caused

My dear colleague, Donald Trumpington III, the CEO at International Systems Integrated Software headquartered out of Syria (for tax reasons, I understand) has just re-organised the company in order to prop up Management’s request for an increased bonus this year.

He has kindly offered to share his company’s new organisation chart with us all.

The usual 10% of his minions will get the heave-ho in order to generate sufficient profit, but as its Xmas, they are usually mentally prepared for being cast aside into the howling winds of despair and despondency. To ease their pain, dear Donald has allowed them to come to the first hour of the office party for a soft drink and a mince pie. If they stayed later they would just hoover up the atmosphere for the rest of the team with their long faces and whingeing.

There’s some more good news! I.M.M. members are invited to apply for a new role at I.S.I.S, which reports directly into the VP of Fear, Dotty Beaver, Dotty as you may recall provided us with her festive Roast Kitten recipe last year.

Please attach a C.V., cover letter and send a magnum of Bolly to the Club where applications will be evaluated based on who you know rather than on merit.

Note: I.S.I.S. do actively discriminate on almost every form of deviation from the norm so if you do not; look like, behave like, act like, the typical average, underperforming, middle management muppet, then don’t waste the postage.

A new survey by Reed.co.uk has found that most people rate a good work/life balance above salary when it comes to career satisfaction.The survey found that the following 10 factors were most important for contentment at work:

Easy daily commute

Cool / fun work space

Good work / life balance

Salary

Job security

Work social events

Working alongside inspiring colleagues

Good promotion prospects

Extra holiday

Dress down Friday

The I.M.M. therefore suggest that if you are looking to downsize efficiently, i.e. get the ungrateful lot of money grabbing, whining malcontents that drain your company’s profits off the books may we respectfully suggest the following ‘re-organisation’

Move the office away from public transport and have manager-only parking

Following the arrests of six senior officials on suspicion of corruption, Fifa’s director of communications Walter de Gregorio gave a press conference on Wednesday morning.

Far from admitting that two criminal investigations into “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted” corruption were a damning indictment on the organisation or its president, De Gregorio seemed upbeat.

Here are 10 of the most bizarre quotes he gave:

1: In this case, Fifa is the damaged party… it is a difficult moment for us.

2: This for Fifa is good, it’s not good in terms of image, it’s not good in terms of reputation, but in terms of cleaning up this is good.

3: This is good. It confirms we are on the right track… but it hurts.

4: We were as surprised as you guys were.

5: The president [Sepp Blatter] is not involved, but how can you say whatsoever he has to step down. He is the president and in two days there are elections. If the 209 members re-elect him then he is the president for the next four years.

6: First of all [Blatter] is focused on congress, let’s just say the stress factor is a little higher today than yesterday. But he is quite relaxed, he knows and it has been confirmed today that he is not involved.

7: The president is not involved, so how can you say he has to step down? He was not involved.

8: [Blatter]’s not dancing in his office. He’s very calm, he sees what happened, he’s fully cooperative with everybody. He’s not kind of a happy man today and says ‘wow, wow, that’s really cool, what happens here’ but he knows that this is the consequence of what we initiated. It’s a surprise it happened today but it’s not a surprise it happened.

9: Russia and Qatar will be played. That, today, is a fact.

10: [The officials] arrested have not been convicted yet so how can we suspend them?

There are procedures but you can’t expect that at 6am when the attorney general turns up we just suspend them. We’re talking about something that started five hours ago, we’re still finding out information.

To expect now that at such short notice we would suspend people on no evidence.

Here’s a useful PR tip, if your company ever finds itself mired in accusations, allegations and indictments then replace ‘FIFA’ with your company name and ‘Blatter’ with your CEO’s name and you are sorted.

Anne Wojcicki, former spouse of the founder of Google, Sergey Brin parks where she wants to. When she is caught, which is 50% of the time, she simply pays the fines.

Although she has a net worth of around $20Bn and can afford to pay these charges off immediately it’s still blatantly unfair that the Californian authorities have yet to offer a bulk discount enabling her to save money on her contributions to the State. What about two fines for the price of one, a season ticket or 50% off on Black Fridays?

And why should we clamour for help for this wonderful lady? Well single handedly due to her admirable pig headiness, understandable upper class arrogance and refusal to fall in line with the pseudo socialist mantras of the local traffic enforcement authorities, she is funding whole communities with her selfless acts. Yet another example of how Rich People are often persecuted by those they selflessly help out.

We all know that Rich People are intrinsically better than Poor People. This is because they have more money ergo they are more successful, obviously work harder and certainly dress better so why the authorities (note; mostly made up of poor people) want Rich People to follow rules primarily aimed at the lower classes is anyone’s guess.

It is just about understandable that this should occassionally happen in the UK, where from time to time we have socialist cabals in power but its intensely worrying that this happens across the pond where you regularly shoot Poor People and where Rich People are usually merely admonished respectfully.

The *Committee for Rich Advantaged People has the following proposal which will be presented for consideration and then forced through anyway. The following irritations should NOT apply to the better off:

Parking restrictions

Speed restrictions

Queuing for anything

Waiting for anything

Being forced to mix with those of lower standing

And how do you join us at CRAP? Just tick the boxes below and if all these apply then you are in.